Tag Archives: muhammadu Buhari

With an extra five members, stuffed with party loyalists and an average age of 60, President Muhammadu Buhari‘s new ministerial team cannot be accused of exuding dynamism or imagination. Announced two days after about a dozenpeople were killed in the capital when Shiite protestors clashed witharmed police, the composition of the new government reinforced the sense of a lack of executive urgency as the country’s national security crisis was spiraling out of control.

The list reinforces the view that President Buhari’s second term will be like his first: tortuously slow decision-making, a reluctance to sanction bad performance in the security services orin the ministries, personal loyalty trumping competence and a tolerance for politicians facing serial corruption charges.

…. The youngest nominee at 46 – five years older than France’s current president – is Ali Isa Ibrahim Pantami(Gombe), a world class technology expert and trained Imam who has led the National Information Technology Development Agency since 2016.

The median age in Nigeria is 17.9 years (which is not to say that cabinet ministers should be in their twenties).

The problem with having such an old cabinet is that ministers are likely to employ equally old lieutenants, with the outcome being that everyone in government ends up being either too tired to put in the much needed work or too busy with their personal “businesses”.

At 35 per cent, the turn-out for Nigeria’s general election in February was the lowest for any presidential (and parliamentary) ballot since democracy succeeded military rule twenty years ago.

According to the International IDEA electoral turnout database, Nigeria’s turnout in the February presidential election was the worst recorded among African states (Click on image to enlarge. Figures indicate the most recent presidential election). That is, it was lower than even in dictatorships where presidential elections are often pro forma exercises designed to stroke autocrats’ egos.

Given what is at stake, one would have expected Nigerian elites to do all they could to make sure that their voters made it to the polls. The fact that they did not suggest a major political market failure, or specific interventions by powerful actors to keep voters from the polls.

Oshodi is one of the big markets in central Lagos with many Igbo traders. To their exasperation, Tinubu shut it down two days before polling, while he strolled around protected by ‘security agents’, i.e. police. This show of power – which had been preceded by threats of new ‘taxes’ on the traders if they proved ‘stubborn’ – prefigured what was to happen when voting began. A lengthy complaint by PDP agents from several of the polling stations described how ‘hoodlums and miscreants led by Musliu Akinsanya … took over the conduct of the election at the polling units … with arms and ammunition.’ They carried other ‘dangerous weapons such as machetes, charms and amulets’ but the police made no attempt to arrest them. Independent observers concurred, as did YouTube, where you can see the ‘hoodlums and miscreants’ casually trashing ballot boxes while voters flee. In other parts of the state many voters simply stayed at home. The result was that Lagos reported the lowest turnout of any state at just 17 per cent of almost seven million registered voters.

You would think that voters in Lagos, the wealthiest state in Nigeria (with a sizable revenue base) would have more skin in the game, and therefore register a higher turnout rate. However, Nigeria is no different than most low-income democracies where turnout rates among relatively poorer voters is often higher than among the rich.

The conventional wisdom that the poor are less likely to vote than the rich is based upon research on voting behavior in advanced industrialized countries. However, in some places, the relationship between turnout and socioeconomic status is reversed. We argue that the potential tax exposure of the rich explains the positive relationship between income and voting in some places and not others. Where the rich anticipate taxation, they have a greater incentive to participate in politics, and politicians are more likely to use fiscal policy to gain support. We explore two factors affecting the tax exposure of the rich—the political salience of redistribution in party politics and the state’s extractive capacity. Using survey data from developed and developing countries, we demonstrate that the rich turn out to vote at higher rates when the political preferences of the rich and poor diverge and where bureaucratic capacity is high.

His street support is still impressive across the north and he remains a force to be reckoned with – even if his APC allies are divided or upset with the primaries or his overall approach to governance. With the powers of incumbency behind him, he may hold the upper hand. Many of the 21 APC governors will also hold this advantage, but more of them will be vulnerable to PDP challengers, especially in Plateau, Kaduna, Kogi, Imo, and perhaps even Lagos and Kano, although these latter two states look stronger for the APC.

Atiku’s deep experience in election matters may outflank Buhari’s APC handlers, but he will need more than just his deep pockets to outbuy or check the APC machine. He will also need to demonstrate genuine public support, mobilised by a major ground operation backed by local PDP networks.

At 71, Atiku is more energetic and comfortable with speaking on the stump than the taciturn, 75-year-old Buhari. That will be important for reaching Nigeria’s social media-savvy voters, who threw their weight behind Buhari in 2015 but have grown frustrated with his slow pace. If the election does end up close, as appears likely, the APC’s control of the security forces may prove pivotal and provoke a crisis. If, however, Atiku does in fact win and the APC respects the result, as Jonathan did in 2015, Nigerians may at least come to feel that elections, however flawed, can lead to change.

Alex Thurston over at Sahel Blog has an excellent take on the credentials of the two leading candidates in the Nigerian election – the incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan and challenger Muhammadu Buhari. Thurston, in particular, cautions against simplistic narratives about either candidate that only serve to distract from the universe of issues at stake in this election:

In much international coverage of the race, whether by non-Nigerian journalistsor Nigerians speaking to international audiences, the two candidates have been presented in crude and one-dimensional ways. The narrative at work in such commentaries says that Jonathan is a bumbler – a nice guy perhaps, but ultimately an “accidental president” who is in over his head, too incompetent to deal with problems like corruption or the violence caused by Boko Haram in the northeastern part of the country. Meanwhile, the same narrative tells us that Buhari is a thug – an essentially military man whose record is fatally tarnished by his regime’s actions in the 1980s, and whose prospects for winning the presidency have grown only because of Nigerians’ anxieties about Boko Haram. The narrative goes on to say that Nigerians face two very bad choices for president – perhaps implying that “the devil they know” is the better choice.

In related news Nigeria’s INEC on Tuesday announced that it had hit a 75% PVC issuance rate (or around 52 million people) to the almost 67 million registered voters. This included an average issuance rate of 76% in the three states worst hit by the Boko Haram insurgency (Yobe, Adamawa, and Borno).

On February 14 Nigerians will go to the polls in what is arguably the most important election in the world this year. Here is a (small) collection of things you need to read before then:

1. Alex Thurston has a great backgrounder for CSIS on the upcoming Nigerian elections. Want to know about the coalitions angling for power in Abuja and state capitals all over Nigeria and how ongoing political maneuvers will impact the outcome of the presidential election? Then click here.

2. Earlier this month Nigerian journalist Tolu Ogunlesi wrote an excellent piece for FT that emphasized the fact that this will be Nigeria’s closest and most unpredictable election yet (a point echoed by Zainab Usman, a Nigerian DPhil Candidate at Oxford, over at African Arguments). The level of competition will no doubt put pressure on INEC, and the losing candidate, to ensure that the legitimacy of the process is not tarnished, regardless of the outcome.

Hong Kong police fired water cannon and volleys of tear gas to break up protesters throwing petrol bombs and bricks near the Legislative Council building and central government offices on Sunday, the latest in weeks of sometimes violent unrest.

Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthi group on Saturday attacked two plants at the heart of Saudi Arabia's oil industry in a strike that could impact about 5 million barrels per day of crude production - close to half of the kingdom's output, or 5% of global oil supply.